Empowering the Iranian regime

Every move the White House makes strengthens the Iranian government – even Washington analysts must accept this by now. But within Iran, aside from the war of words between Khamenei's minions and the Bush administration, it is a reconfiguring of the political classes that has got the middle classes talking.

Whole areas in even the upmarket north of Tehran have been shut down for demonstrations, however ill-conceived. Thousands of brick-makers are on strike in the north-western city of Orumieh, provoking arrests and the intimidation of families of strikers. Towards Iraq, in the west, there has been a month-long strike at the Haft-Tapeh sugar cane factory in the ancient city of Shush because of unpaid wages. Thousands were also on strike in the Qarchak Brick factory in Varamin, south of Tehran.

Little is printed about worker power but even in parliament, the words of one MP, Mesbahi Moqadam, attacking factory owners for using their money to invest in the lucrative property market instead of industrial production were reported in the press. Ministers have relaxed import controls in exchange for oil export contracts with China and India – only to destroy home-grown manufacturing.

But if the disconnectedness of town and country, suburb and town cripples information in Iran, one case of a man in the capital's Evin prison is sharpening conversations in the cities. Abbas Palizdar, a member of the Iranian parliament's judicial inquiry and review committee and a supporter of president Ahmadinejad, is banged up in the notorious jail for squealing about corruption in the higher echelons of Iranian political life. Think Scott McClellan whistleblowing.

"I feel they try to give the impression that I'm saying these things because of the elections, but it has nothing to do with elections. I had some obligation on behalf of martyrs. It was my religious duty to bring up these things because I had a feeling that the majlis [parliament] has no intention to go forward on these issues. So, I did it myself," Palizdar said.

While Ahmadinejad is squeaky clean and irritated about not reducing the gap between rich and poor despite rising oil prices, the clerics and reformists have been stealing state money and sewing up deals for relatives for years. Ahmadinejad's predecessor, president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who chairs the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Council – the bodies that will choose Khamenei's successor – runs the pistachio market but his brother is governor of Qom, the haunt of Moqtada al-Sadr. His nephew is on the majlis oil committee and his eldest son runs the capital's biggest infrastructure project, the underground railway.

Between other relations being governors of other towns and his involvement in big foreign joint ventures with South Korea and his resort in Goa, even a visitor from Mars would see little difference between him and the late CIA-backed Shah.

But not since the revolution has anyone talked so openly about corruption. Palizdar chose universities in Hamadan and Shiraz to talk about 44 officials including the present Friday prayer leader, Mohammad Emami Kashani, and clerics like the head of the Imam Reza Shrine Foundation, Ayatollah Vaez Tabbasi – fingering them all for theft.

There are two theories about why someone so close to President Ahmadinejad should do this. One has it that Ahmadinejad is jockeying for power ahead of next year's presidential elections and he is perturbed about Khamenei being cosy with his rival, the newly-elected Ali Larijani. But Ahmadinejad didn't count on the wrath of the Supreme Leader and since Palizdar's imprisonment, the incumbent's days are numbered.

Another, more conspiratorial interpretation, is that Khamenei told Ahmadinejad to expose corruption, thus weakening the reformists and at the same time compounding his brilliant strategy of divide and rule. The elite are now in accusing and counter-accusing mode. Corruption is the get-all charge and no one knows who the Leader of the Islamic Revoution, Khamenei, is favouring. Larijani has gone as quiet as Palizdar in his cell.

There is only one thing unifying them all: their love of playing the patriot card to the Iranian electorate in the face of US and Israeli aggression. The corrupt classes want nuclear energy for domestic power consumption so that they can cream off the profits from oil exports. They don't like wasting refined oil on the Iranian people when the profits from exporting it could go into Swiss bank accounts.

And so the Bush administration – and the Brown government in Britain which gives tacit approval to dangerous cults such as the MKO seeking to overthrow the Iranian government – helps to seal Ahmadinejad's power. All this just as maturing worker movements have their eyes on the citadel, mobilising support as inflation accelerates. Gordon Brown and George Bush give power to the government here. Thus Britain and the US empowers Hizbullah, Hamas and the anti-occupation forces in Iraq, some of which kill their own soldiers.